Guides
Guides to How Intuition Works
Short, careful explanations of the ideas behind the games, with the research named so you can look it up.
Read, then try
Each guide covers one idea from psychology or cognitive science in plain language, explains what is known and what is still debated, and ends with games that let you test the idea on yourself. We keep to well-established findings and say clearly when the evidence is mixed.
How Intuition Works: Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking and EstimationWhat psychologists mean by intuition, when a gut feeling is reliable, when it misleads, and how fast feedback turns rough impressions into calibrated judgement.Weber's Law: Why Small Differences Are Harder to Spot in Big ThingsWeber's law and Stevens' power law explained: why you notice one extra candle in a dark room but not in a bright one, and why estimation tasks use logarithmic scales.The Wisdom of Crowds: Why Averages Beat Most Individual GuessesHow Francis Galton's 1907 ox-weighing contest showed that averaging many independent guesses can beat experts, when it works, and how to be your own crowd.Anchoring: How an Irrelevant Number Bends Your EstimateThe anchoring effect explained with the classic Tversky and Kahneman experiments, why even random numbers pull estimates, and practical ways to resist them.Working Memory: Why You Can Hold About Four Things at OnceWhat working memory is, how Miller's magical number seven became about four, how span tasks like Corsi blocks and n-back work, and how to remember more by chunking.Time Perception: How Your Brain Estimates SecondsHow people judge short durations, why time seems to stretch and shrink, what counting does to accuracy, and why intervals are easier to compare than to name.Reaction Time: How Fast Is a Human, Really?Typical human reaction times, what limits them, how Hick's law and the speed-accuracy trade-off work, and why a faster tap is not always a better one.The Stroop Effect and Selective AttentionWhy reading the word 'RED' printed in blue ink is hard, what that says about automatic processes and attention, and how Schulte tables and odd-one-out search train focus.Change Blindness: Why You Miss Big Changes Right in Front of YouChange blindness and inattentional blindness explained with the gorilla and flicker experiments, why memory for scenes is sparse, and how to spot changes more reliably.Probability Intuition: Why Chances Feel WrongBase-rate neglect, the gambler's fallacy, the birthday paradox and how natural frequencies make probabilities easier to judge, with advice for better odds estimates.Fermi Estimation: How to Guess Big Numbers WellA step-by-step guide to Fermi estimation, the habit of breaking an unknown quantity into known pieces, with worked examples and an explanation of why errors cancel.Physical Intuition: How Well Do You Know How Things Move?Naive physics, the size-weight illusion and falling objects: what people get right and wrong about gravity, balance and motion, and how to build a better feel for them.